The few

The number of Jews in Britain has halved since the war, thanks mostly to large numbers 'marrying out'. But, as in other religions in a secular age, those who remain within the faith are more committed than ever. Which is not to say there aren't bitter, and possibly dangerous, divisions inside the community. By Michael Freedland.

It was the big story of the week for the Jewish Chronicle: Gwyneth Paltrow is Jewish. Her relatives said so. There she was in a huge colour picture. The message was clear: the paper was delighted at the idea of a celebrity being "one of ours". That's what comes of belonging to a small, relatively compact group who think of themselves as a family. Suddenly finding a relative no one knew of, even one living more than 5,000 miles away, has a frisson about it that people who come from much bigger sets might find difficult to appreciate. For the worry in the Jewish community at the moment is that very smallness of the family. While a population explosion hits almost everyone else, British Jews now number something like 280,000 - less than half the figure at the end of the second world war. The Jewish birth rate has declined enormously. Another look at the Chronicle shows just how things have changed. At one time, there were twice as many birth announcements as deaths. Now, the situation has been reversed: the latest figures show that the community is reducing in size by as many as 2,000 people a year - with the death rate exceeding the births by 1,000 a year.

There's always a certain amount of emigration: the familiar Passover prayer of "Next Year In Jerusalem" is perhaps answered for a handful of enthusiasts, mostly young people - but there is a bigger, more personal aspect, which the Chief Rabbi, Dr Jonathan Sacks, put into perspective in a book he called Will We Have Jewish Grandchildren? Before they think that far ahead, mothers all over the country pose another question: Will I have a Jewish daughter-in-law? Or son-in-law? For a religion that actively discourages conversion, this is a serious question. A child who "marries out" is considered lost to his/her faith.

Judaism used to be a proselytising religion, but long ceased to be one - the Romans ruled in the 4th century that, with Christianity becoming the official faith of their empire, any attempts to convert people to Judaism would be punishable by death. "And with typical Jewish realism, and that policy imposed upon us," said Rabbi Dr Jeffrey Cohen, minister at London's Stanmore Synagogue, "our forebears decided that this should be our policy, too. Now we welcome converts who want to embrace Judaism."

But not, it should be said, who want to embrace Jews. Converting simply for the sake of marrying a member of the faith is rarely acceptable, particularly in Orthodoxy. And so inter-marriage remains one of the main causes for the decline in the size of Anglo-Jewry. But it is not the only one. Marriage itself is going out of style among Jews as it is outside the community. Young people live together without tying the knot. What is more, the declining birth rate among the general population is even greater among Jews.

Not that this has meant a decline in influence. There have rarely been times when there weren't Jews in places of importance in Britain. This was never more so than in the Tory government years, when there was a Jewish foreign secretary (Malcolm Rifkind), two home secretaries (Leon Brittan and Michael Howard) and a chancellor of the exchequer (Nigel Lawson). There was also the man whom Mrs Thatcher said didn't give her problems, but provided answers, her trade secretary, Lord Young. In recent years, there was a Jewish lord chief justice (Lord Taylor) and a chairman of the British Medical Association (John Marks), to say nothing of Jewish controllers of Channel 4 (Jeremy Isaacs and Michael Grade), as well as Alan Yentob at the BBC and David Elstein at Channel 5.

Today, there is just one Jew close to the top in government (minister of state at the home office, Barbara Roche) and none in cabinet. But Lord Woolf is master of the rolls and the current lord mayor of London, Lord Levene, has been active in the community. There are no Jews running the big banks, and almost none in charge of the big corporations. There is only one national newspaper editor who would nominally describe himself as Jewish.

The truth of the matter is that the position of Jews in Britain is like a reversed iceberg. You get what you see. There may be a few hidden Jews, people born into the faith who no one knows are Jewish, but not many. Whatever way you look at it, this is a tiny community. Even if the Jews themselves are the only people aware of it.

The lord mayor came face to face with the issue at the official banquet launching his term of office last November. There, at one of the most important civic and national occasions of the year, were the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Chief Rabbi and a leader of the Muslim community. "He told me there were two million Muslims in Britain. 'The day may come,' he said, 'when we may have as many Muslims here as Jews.' I asked him how many Jews he thought there were. 'Between five and six million,' he said. I told him it was less than 300,000. 'Don't be ridiculous!' he said."

But the lord mayor himself over-estimated the number. Yet those 280,000 - the number worked out by the Board of Deputies of British Jews, based on demographic truths such as marriages and funerals - are distinctly more committed than their parents. It used to be that success in a career or public life meant an instant divorce from Judaism - so unlike Catholics who, no matter how successful they became, still went to Mass on Sundays. Now the Jews, too - those that remain - are more and more keeping faith with their faith.

Anthony Julius, solicitor to the late Diana Princess of Wales, says that Judaism is even more important to him than the law. "It is a constituent part of my life. It is so essential to the sense of myself, as much as having sense of smell or sight." He keeps the kosher dietary laws and belongs to an Orthodox synagogue. "I am inquiring and committed," he said. "On Shabbat [the Sabbath], I don't work. I don't pick up a phone or drive my car. And I have to say that my work has not suffered. I've still got my legal practice, I'm writing two books, working for charities, but it is Shabbat that energises me."

Lord Winston, Labour life peer and the head of the world's most famous fertility unit at London's Hammersmith Hospital, says that it is his religion that inspired his work. Surrounded by pictures of his "miracles", the babies born to women who had all but given up hope of ever having children, he told me: "Ever since Sarah prayed to God for a child in her old age, the gift of fertility has been a cardinal hope in Judaism." He is a man who practises his faith every day of the week, but on Friday afternoons, as dusk falls and the Sabbath commences, he leaves his work behind. He stands at the head of his family table, a glass of wine in his hand and pronounces the ritual blessings over the Sabbath "chalah" loaves.

In the days when the community was twice as big, Jews were half as secure. They changed their name from Cohen to Conway or from Kaminsky to Kaye (which, ironically, has itself become a Jewish name). Some who were brought up in Hendon or Golders Green or north London's Orthodox suburb of Stamford Hill - and before them, the once intensely Jewish areas of the East End - moved away to the home counties or to other parts of London. Michael Winner's family settled in Holland Park, providing the future film director with a setting for a bar mitzvah he will never forget - his mother celebrated the occasion by holding a poker party. "I sat all by myself in a bedroom surrounded by mink coats." It probably wouldn't happen today.

When I spoke to Anthony Julius, it was in his new home in an unfashionable street in Hendon. "I think it right that we have our conversation in Jewish London," he said. A prayer book was sitting on a shelf in the kitchen next to his kettle. There were silver cups, used for reciting the Friday night blessings, in pride of place on his bookshelves. Jews are more open about their religion. When they were part of a community that was twice as big, people sat on underground trains hiding their copy of the Jewish Chronicle inside their evening paper. Now, even in non-Jewish areas of the provinces, young men walk around wearing little knitted skullcaps. In Gateshead, in the heart of the north-east, an ultra-Orthodox enclave exists where women in wigs wheel prams followed by crocodiles of their children, their bearded husbands walking alongside the pram.

In north London, an entire street has been taken over by a religious community and has been named Schonfeld Square by Hackney Council, after a rabbi who saved hundreds of child Holocaust victims. And every Friday night, when Schonfeld Square is roped off from traffic, two candles burn five miles away in the lord mayor's flat at the Mansion House, the centre of the nation's financial capital. The Sabbath is celebrated there each week that the lord mayor and lady mayoress are in residence.

Levene is the eighth Jewish lord mayor of London, but the only one this century to have a religious commitment. Within three hours of his own installation - in fact, his first official engagement - he attended a service of thanksgiving that was incorporated into the Sabbath eve service at the 300-year-old Bevis Marks Synagogue, the oldest in the country and the only one in the City. Its rabbi, Dr Abraham Levy, is one of his chaplains. Lord Levene - he was secretary of state for the environment and before that chief of defence procurement, both under Margaret Thatcher - speaks as a man rooted in the City. His great-great-grandfather was born there. His own ward, Portsoken, he is pleased to report, is still "the Jewish ward" - and to prove it showed me the local voters' register, reading out with undisguised glee the Jewish names he came across. This used to be the centre of London Jewish life, the tenement symphony of a district where poorer Jews still discussed problems in the kitchens.

This kitchen warmth thing is, frankly, what makes many Jews feel Jewish - even if they don't feel religious. Maureen Lipman did not actually have chicken soup on the boil when I turned up at her house in Muswell Hill, north London, but we did begin talking in the kitchen. On the door (as elsewhere in the house) was the traditional mazuzah, a small tube containing verses from the scriptures, as decreed in the Bible ("it shall be a sign for you"). On one of the walls there was a sign that was not Biblical, but had plainly come from an American joke shop: "Mama's Kosher Kitchen."

Lipman has had great success in many roles, including playing Joyce Grenfell - as white Anglo-Saxon Protestant as they ever came -but it was as Beattie, the heroine of the BT commercials, that people think of her. For years, she has been greeted by people telling her they had got "an ology". But it is only comparatively recently that she has become intensely attached to her faith. It was the charismatic late Rabbi Hugo Gryn who helped her and her husband, the writer Jack Rosenthal, appreciate what she calls the "spiritual side" of Judaism.

Now she lights Sabbath candles at home - the very traditional role of a Jewish mother - before going to the theatre on Friday evenings. One after the other, Jews to whom I have spoken about their Jewishness say it is a question of belonging. "I remember," said Lipman, "that when I met Jack for the second time, I thought, 'Thank God he's Jewish and I can take him home.' I think it was a case of having a deep rapport that cut across the centuries because we're both Jews. It's hard if you're outside it. I feel, as a Jew, that I am still living with ancestors."

Then there is the whizzkid literary agent, 32-year-old Jonny Geller. He also says, "It's a sense of belonging, a sense of history, a sense of continuing a story, a sense of commitment to those who have suffered for Judaism. But, more important, it is a culture that is so very Jewish. I love Jewish writing, the Bible, Talmud - right up to Bashevis Singer. It's a language. If you meet a fellow Jew anywhere in the world, you have something in common."

The South African-born actress Janet Suzman says, "I am always pleased that I am Jewish. Always. But I hate being invaded by fundamentalism. One hopes that Jews are too intelligent to bring God into the secular world but, unfortunately, there is a wedge driven between secular Jews like me and the God-botherers."

And Anglo-Jewry, small as it is, is bitterly divided between its two religious extremes, the Orthodox on one hand, the Reform and Liberal communities on the other. It all came to a head three years ago, when the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, refused to attend the funeral of Hugo Gryn, famous for his appearances on BBC Radio 4's Moral Maze as well as for being the leader of the Reform movement. Things have gone from bad to worse in the Jewish religious world since then - with Sacks, in trying to heal the rift, finding that not just the progressive wings of Judaism but the even more Orthodox sections of the community refuse to recognise his authority.

The Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox groups are vociferous in attacking the "progressive" Jews, members of the Reform and Liberal communities whom they consider to be enemies of true Judaism. On the other hand, those groups are now flexing their own muscles and demanding both a greater say in the general community and more recognition from outside (they, for instance, are demanding that the Chief Rabbi should be accepted as leader of only a part of Anglo-Jewry).

Hugo Gryn called his Orthodox opponents "the Ayatollahs" and, indeed, fundamentalism is at the heart of the matter. Thirty-five years ago, an Orthodox rabbi, Dr Louis Jacobs, previously spoken of as a possible future Chief Rabbi, was barred from being the principal of Jews College, the main theological seminary in the community, because he wrote a book questioning the belief that every word of the Old Testament was dictated by God. Although he is one of Britain's most learned rabbis who keeps all the religious precepts, he is still regarded by the Chief Rabbinate and his advisers as beyond the pale. He set up his own "Masorti" (Hebrew for conservative) congregation which now has seven synagogues. In Jewish terms, they are regarded as "left of centre". (Jews have taken the political labels for themselves - the Orthodox are on the right; the Reform and Liberals on the left.)

Every now and again, someone raises his voice to warn that if these rows are not settled, the community is in serious trouble. Like 33-year-old Rabbi Shmuly Boteach, who came to Britain from America 10 years ago and recently wrote in a Jewish newspaper that he thought all young Jews should pack up and leave. "I said that because I thought that the fighting would never end, that it just gets worse." The smallness of Anglo-Jewry has a lot to do with it. "The community is mean-spirited. Rabbis won't work together. We're locked in the past, and always operate under the notion that there are not enough Jews. If you start something new, you'll be taking it away from me, that's the attitude. When a new community is set up, like the Saatchi Synagogue [established by the advertising brothers, who had previously seemed to eschew Judaism] intended for young people who don't want the witch-doctor approach, we think of all sorts of reasons why it shouldn't happen, but we should be jumping for joy."

Much more optimistic is another American, Ned Temko, editor of the Jewish Chronicle since 1990: "I'm less spooked about the internal arguments than other people," he says. "What makes communities thrive and ultimately survive is argument, and we have plenty of that. We have strengths here that should make American Jews jealous. Anglo-Jewry has always been overly-structured, and people didn't want dissension and pretended that problems didn't exist. Now we are in a process of growing up. People are talking about marrying out, about the Hugo Gryn affair, about homosexuality, women's rights. The fact that people get exercised about them doesn't show that the community is more divided. I think I would be more worried if the two strands of the community, Orthodox and Progressive, didn't care enough to fight."

Editors are supposed to like controversial decisions. Rabbis are not. Shmuli Boteach was fired by the Hassidic Lubavich movement for his outlandish ideas, not least of which was writing a best-seller called Kosher Sex. It was not his only "indiscretion" - he also wrote a Jewish guide to adultery - although he would say he was doing his pastoral duty in telling young couples that Judaism had no hang-ups about sex. Except, perhaps, in the old joke about mixed dancing. That was not allowed because it could lead to people sleeping together. "Tell me rabbi," asked an unworldly bridegroom-to-be, "can I do it lying down with her on top of me?" "Of course," said the rabbi. "And what about sideways?" "Certainly," the rabbi replied. "And sitting down?" "If you can manage it, why not?" replied the cleric. "And standing up?" "Absolutely not," the rabbi retorted. "That could lead to mixed dancing."

What the great rabbis of the past would have made of Rabbi Elizabeth Tikva Sarah is uncertain. She changed her surname from Klempner - because, she says, "when people see my name, it tunes people in. They can see that there is such a thing as a Jewish lesbian." All was going swimmingly for this 40-something Reform rabbi in a small leafy Hertfordshire community until she announced from her pulpit that she was going to perform the first lesbian wedding in Anglo-Jewry. It happened on the eve of Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year, at the most crowded service of all. The congregation at the Radlett Reform Synagogue was at first in shock, she said. "Then I heard cries of 'Abomination' and a few people walked out." The result was that she was drummed out of the Reform movement. Now she ministers to a more progressive Liberal synagogue in Leicester "who are very supportive, like my family. But most people in this staid community [the Jewish community at large] can't get to grips with having a lesbian who is also a rabbi."

Despite that, there are always features of Judaism to attract people such as Janet Suzman. "Jews have always stood for civil rights," says the niece of the anti-apartheid campaigner Helen Suzman. It was a point echoed by both Maureen Lipman and Barbara Roche, who both look at that fight against intolerance with a degree of pride. Jews' activities on behalf of civil rights in South Africa and the US are well known. In Britain, Jews were at the centre of the campaign for a race relations act and have been prominent in the fight to have the act strengthened. Rabbis, Jewish MPs and the Board of Deputies have fought, too, for more sympathetic asylum legislation.

One area in which Jews have been united is in their support of Israel. However, the division in Israel itself - between those on the one hand belonging to the "Peace Now" movement, which spearheaded the campaign to elect the new government of Ehud Barak, and the pro-settler movement on the other - is mirrored here, the majority veering to the Peace Now side. And, subtly, the commitment to the Jewish state is changing. Eldred Tabachnik told me: "I would say that 10 years ago it was absolutely central to Jewish life. It is still important, but in a different way - fund-raising used to be based on Israel first and community concerns second. Now Israel is a prosperous country. We help Israel when necessary, but we no longer neglect our own community."

Johnny Geller, too, said that Israel was "very important". But, he explained, "I feel more and more cut off from it. I still want Israel to be exceptional, on a pedestal. But when I hear of religious students beating up an old man whom they saw watching television on the Sabbath, I get very angry. If they don't have Jewish ethics, what is there?"

Michael Winner never went to the Jewish state until he made the Agatha Christie film Appointment With Death there. He had no wish to go - largely because his father had left him responsibility for dozens of covenants to Israeli charities and built a synagogue in the country. "But when I did go, I found it quite the most beautiful place I've ever been to. I loved it to death. I admired the Jews for going there and making it work, and I admired the Arabs for preserving their way of life. If it didn't exist, I would feel very sad. I think that if Jews no longer had a bolt-hole for all of them who needed it, it would be, in a strange way, a personal loss. I would feel a degree less secure, although it's unlikely that we'd all be thrown out of Britain."

Janet Suzman enjoys Israel, too - but within reason. "I remember my Dad standing on a corner of Dizingoff Street in Tel Aviv and looking at the people. 'Salt of the earth,' he said, 'and, like salt, you can have too much of it.'"

In Britain, the community's network of mostly state schools is over-subscribed. Barbara Roche was herself once head girl of Britain's biggest Jewish School, JFS - where Anthony Julius sends his children - the successor to the Jews Free School, which, until it was bombed in its East End home in the Blitz, was the nursery of most of the community's then leaders. In those days, JFS saw as its duty to convert young Jews into good Englishmen. Today, the successor school in London's Camden Town says its responsibility is to convert "ordinary" children into committed Jews.

That doesn't mean that the schools are havens of peace. Just going to a Jewish school brings problems. There are security guards, armed with walkie-talkies, outside most buildings - as there are on the doorsteps of synagogues whenever there is a service going on - in case of attack by neo-fascist groups or Islamic extremists. Both in the past have proved to have been threats.

Jon Mendelssohn, a partner in a parliamentary lobbying firm, told me: "I went to an Orthodox Jewish school, which meant that I was a convenient target for people's hatred, being attacked on the way home from school, that sort of thing. But that was a useful preparation for politics." Then he added: "I think it is important to realise that anti-Semitism does exist. It concerns me, but I don't think this is something about which we should be obsessed. Lord Jakobovits, the former Chief Rabbi, said that 100 friends is too few. One enemy is too many." So how strong is anti-Semitism in Britain?

Probably not as strong as it used to be. Publisher Jeremy Robson - who once worked with Israel's first prime minister, David Ben Gurion - recalled having to learn boxing at school, "because my father had suffered tremendously from anti-Semitism". Barbara Roche said she knows there is anti-Semitism about, "but not overtly. It's subtle." The question of her Jewishness has never come up in an election campaign. "I'm not sure if people knew I was Jewish or not." But Anthony Julius told me: "When I was looking for articles, many of the bigger firms didn't take Jews, so there was no point in applying. My feeling is that would still be the case - but in a more limited way."

Plainly, the lord mayor of London believes the fact that he has attained his office proves that anti-Semitism is no problem in the City. "I didn't experience any when I was at school in the City for 10 years - I understand that last year the City of London school had a succah [the flimsy 'tabernacle' structure in which religious Jews are supposed to eat during the eight-day autumn Feast of Tabernacles] in the playground. I didn't see anti-Semitism at university and I didn't experience it in government or in the ministry of defence. Of course, it exists. There are anti-Semites just as there are people who are anti-fox-hunting."

"It's usually frightfully smart," says Janet Suzman, "a chance innuendo and you realise that it's just lurking below the surface." There are ironies, too. "I remember one of my teachers at LAMDA, Frieda Hodgson, an eccentric old bird, meeting me for the first time. She knew I was Jewish. 'Wonderful,' she said, '5,000 years of suffering - use it darling.'" Jonny Geller had a similar experience. "There was a partner in my agency who said she was so pleased to have me in the firm: 'People like you - you know, people who are not English - Jewish.' I didn't think that was anti-Semitic, just funny. But I didn't want to be known as not English."

Rabbi Michael Harris of London's fashionable Hampstead Synagogue says, "I've met it, though, wherever I have been. If you go with a kippar [skullcap] or black hat, as Jews do on Shabbat, you'll see it."

"I think there's pretty little anti-Semitism," says Eldred Tabachnik QC, president of the Board of Deputies. "What there is comes from a few hundred racial extremists without any popular or electoral support. We know what they are up to and follow their activities. It is much worse in France and Austria, and there is some in Italy."

I am not quite so sanguine. As a very young journalist I was offered a job on the old Daily Herald newspaper. But the offer went with strings attached: they already had a number of Jewish writers and, if I wanted the job, I'd have to change my name. In a demonstration of unity - and I don't know now how I was able to afford it - I told them where they could put their job. There were no other experiences until a couple of years ago, when my wife and I were waiting at the counter of a supermarket. My wife asked politely how long the check-out girl was going to take before she was ready to deal with us. At which point, her previous customer - who had long since finished her transaction and was now talking about her holidays - rounded on us: "You're a load of pigs. That's why they put you in the ovens, because that's what you do with pigs."

In truth, there is always a worry about something. Cemeteries are desecrated; and when there was a spate of nail-bomb attacks in the summer - culminating in the blowing up of the London gay pub - it did not take much police persuasion for Jews to prepare themselves to be the next on the bombers' list.

Certainly, there has been a suspicion of prejudice at the top. It was Harold Macmillan who rejoiced at the departure from government of Leon Brittan - described by Lord Denning as "a German Jew" - and said he was glad that there were now "more Old Etonians than Old Estonians" in the cabinet.

Perhaps the best demonstration of how attitudes have altered can be seen in Macmillan's own party. One really doesn't have to say more than this sentence: "William Hague's chief speechwriter is named Danny Finklestein."

The very idea would have been virtually unthinkable before the Thatcher revolution - when Jewish-born MPs such as Gerald Nabarro and Raymond Adley (n Adler) denied their Jewishness and made a point of being seen at their local parish church. (It also has to be said that even Robert Maxwell once ordered the Jewish Chronicle to remove his name from their list of Jewish Labour MPs, a decision he later admitted he regretted.)

"It does indicate a change," says Finklestein. "The Conservative Party was not a natural home for an immigrant Jewish scientist like my father. But Mrs Thatcher changed all that, by making much more of an emphasis on the party and Britain being a more mobile society."

Finklestein, 36, is a third generation member of a Reform synagogue. His mother is a Holocaust survivor, his father escaped from Russian-controlled Poland. "The Holocaust has greatly influenced my life. I have been richly endowed by my mother's stories."